[photonthug]

> With such a huge number of choices, discovery is now the issue.

It's frustrating if people don't see that this is almost always a manufactured problem, not some an inevitable outcome of simply having more choices. Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.

Discovery needs to be just good enough so that users won't leave, and if there's no alternatives in a space, even that doesn't matter. Having poor discoverability directly increases engagement and nevermind that engagement is high because doing simple things is painful, the take-away for your stock-price here will just be that you're explicitly user hostile and no one leaves, so you must have a captive audience.

Every notice how when you're looking for something obscure, you can only find something popular, and when you're looking for something popular, you can only find something obscure? It's not random, it's just the platform working out what profits the company the most.

In the case of streaming content for platforms like spotify/amazon prime, some content is cheaper for them to offer. The perfect user is someone who wants low-royalty or completely unencumbered content, because it's cheaper for the platform to license, but the end-user sees the same number of ads for the same length of time. The average user is also someone who can be tricked into being a perfect customer. Suppose the user is searching for RoboCop, and it is missing from the catalog. Terminator might be a better recc, but why not just offer the user some shitty CyborgCopIII instead, just to cut your costs and bump your profits, just in case the user is a sucker? If the user is not a sucker.. great, they'll type more searches, engagement is up, and platforms win either way.

Think about how much more data FAANG has than say, GoodReads. GoodReads is small enough that people just rank stuff and it works fine, and people curate lists, and you find what you like that way. It's not working because GoodReads has AI super-powers, it's working because they don't sabotage it away from working.

[plorkyeran]

Goodreads shot past the point of being too small to be worth bothering sabotaging years ago, and is now very heavily manipulated.

[badpun]

It's pretty good for dead authors though.

[autoexec]

> Platforms want to disable the ability for users to differentiate between organic, self-directed discovery vs advertised or promoted content.

It's not just that platforms don't want you to know if what they're showing you is an ad or an organic result/recommendation, if they made it easy for people to find what they want then companies wouldn't have to pay them for prominent placement in the first place.

There's still a real problem (that AI will only make worse) with really good things being drowned out by a sea of garbage, but people wanting to act as gatekeepers (and collect tolls) only make the problem worse.

[StrangeDoctor]

Goodreads is faang?

The problem isn’t manufactured or conspiratorial, it’s just baked into sorting so much content on so few metrics. And needing to account for what the user is currently in the mood for something specific, something generic.

[photonthug]

My point is that GoodReads isn't popular enough for it to be profitable to sabotage (yet). And there's still a threat of something more relevant coming along. If they actually wanted to improve discovery for something like prime video/shopping, then they could/would copy what works from GoodReads.

[Ruthalas]

Goodreads is a subsidiary of Amazon.

Edit: I realize I misread your comment. Disregard!

[downWidOutaFite]

Amazon bought goodreads and crippled its discoverability features.